This is The Writer's Voice, new fiction from The New Yorker.

I'm Debra Triesman, fiction editor at The New Yorker.

On this episode of The Writer's Voice,

we'll hear Han Ong read his story Elmhurst from the July 25th, 2022 issue of the magazine.

Ong, the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship in the Berlin Prize,

is the author of more than a dozen plays in two novels,

Fixer Chow, and The Disinherited.

Now here's Han Ong.

Elmhurst

Is the boy in the window attempting to let Pathy with Sharah?

If not, why won't he look away?

His head is three floors up, a postcard, but he's found a son.

Solo, while the other windows on all sides of him feature multiple scalars,

some holding out their cell phones to record.

As above, so below, Sharah on the sidewalk stands amid scalars too,

ranchers and chanters, giving everything they have to this mass protest.

On one side of her is her mother, and on the other her seven-year-old sister, Rosie.

Sharah and her sister are their mother's hostages.

At least her sister is too young to be entrusted with a placard.

There's no such exemption for Sharah.

The sign her mother carries is in a Mandarin.

She doesn't understand or care that carrying those foreign characters is worse

...